The Golden Age of Epic and Heroic Fantasy

This is a very good time for those of us who value literature in all of its many manifestations. The quality of much--not all but much--of the fantasy writing is high. Steven Erikson, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Lois McMaster Bujold, to name only three of many wonderful writers, are doing very interesting and engaging work right now.

Here's a list of some other writers and books you might want to sample:

1) Michelle West, The Sun Sword: The Broken Crown
2) Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium
3) Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
4) Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan
5) Elizabeth Willey, The Well-Favored Man
6) Terry Brooks, Running with the Demon
7) Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
8) Steven Brust, Agyar
9) Elizabeth Moon, Sheepfarmer’s Daughter
10) Jim Butcher, Storm Front
11) Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon

Clio and Orwell's Dog

My dog’s name is Clio. Not Cleo. Not Chloe. Clio.

She is not my best friend, but after my wife, she is the living creature with whom I spend the most time.

Not surprisingly, I notice the dogs in the works I read. In George Orwell’s story-essay “A Hanging,” for example, a dog plays an important role. Orwell spends a paragraph describing how a stray mutt ruins the carefully staged choreography of an execution in Burma: “A dreadful thing had happened—a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard . . . For a moment it pranced around us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it made a dash for the prisoner and, jumping up, tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.”

The symbolism—dog as man’s best friend, as an animal alert to the presence of evil, as a judge not finding evil in the prisoner—is not subtle. But Orwell makes certain that we do not miss it: “I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us.” The dog’s implied judgment is only one thread in the essay’s weaving, and the story-essay, read as a whole, is an assertion of our capacity for self-deception, of our willingness to carry out actions that we know are wrong because of a kind of robotic loyalty to country.

The Online Writing Community

I've been exploring the online writing activity for several weeks now, and there is a lot to say about and think about on this topic.

If you want a clear sense of how much energy people are pouring into online writing, though, take a look at sites like Writing.com (www.writing.com).

The Myth of Short, Wonderful Wars

Paul Fussell, a platoon leader in the 103rd Infantry Division and later a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is a ferocious opponent of militarism and war, which is understandable considering his experiences during World War II. Although he is sometimes crabby, we are fortunate to have citizens like him. Now if only more Americans would read his memoir. In Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, he quotes an American soldier who had lost a foot to a mine. “Sooner or later you’re going to get it in combat,” the man said. “You can’t roll the dice every day and not get waxed.” Later, Fussell describes scared, angry U.S. soldiers in combat, brave men who would toss live grenades into the foxholes, trenches, and pillboxes of surrendering German soldiers, “saying things like ‘Here. Divide that among you.’” The memoirs of British and German and Russian soldiers contain similar stories. Most soldiers seem to see the ludicrousness of envisioning war (even a "just" war) as anything but a mass atrocity.

I wish that more Americans read about battles like Stalingrad or Kursk or Antietam or Cold Harbor. We would have fewer illusions about leaders who promise short, victorious wars and understand more easily why foreign citizens might resent our presence on their home soil.

Art and History and Desire

Some of my earliest memories are set in my elementary school’s library, where I read my way across the wooden shelves holding the histories. Art, according to Joseph Conrad, is “a single-minded effort to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe,” and a good work of history, to my mind, falls within these criteria.

The knowledge I gained served me well as early as the seventh grade. One fine day, my history teacher divided us into groups and set up a question-and-answer competition with a healthy amount of extra-credit points as the reward for victory. He listed topics on the board, and I smiled happily as my group members began an agonized debate over our choice. “Pick World War II,” I commanded, vibrating with excitement. They peered at me as if I were an inmate escaped from the loony bin. One student—the most beautiful girl in our grade—spoke first: “Do you know a lot about that?” I smiled fiercely and ineptly. “If you want to win,” I told her, “pick World War II.” We won. Accumulating obscure knowledge, I concluded, could bring me subsidiary benefits, in addition to high grades, free books, and positive attention from teachers. At relevant occasions, I share this anecdote with my students. The male students, sadly, do not always seem to believe me.

Literature and the Age of the Woman

I am an English professor at a liberal arts college, and English Studies, those of us who are in the know must admit, has finally entered the Age of the Woman.

The growing absence of men was the elephant in our classrooms even before July 2004, when Dana Gioia and the good people at the National Endowment for the Arts released their report “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America.” For adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, the percentage engaged in literary reading has fallen from 59.8 percent in 1982 to 42.8 percent in 2002, and although the decline held for both men and women, fewer men are choosing to devote themselves to lives of reading and writing.

Even television game shows have noticed the change: New York Times reporter Alessandra Stanley, in a 13 July 2004 column about Jeopardy-winner Ken Jennings, reported that “when a young man on a recent episode of [Family] Feud was asked to name something that women love to do and men hate, he replied, ‘Read.’ He was deemed correct: at least three people in the audience survey gave the same answer.”

What happened to my genetic brothers?

Patton's Poetry

George S. Patton wrote poetry. It's true.

Carlo D’Este, in _Patton: A Genius for War_, fleshed out the flat portrayal of a man generally remembered only as a profane, bloody-minded glory hound. (Blame Hollywood.)

Even a cursory reading of Patton’s poetry reveals that the man was driven by much more complicated daemons. In his poem “The Moon and the Dead,” Patton writes,

Pale was her face with anguish
Wet were her eyes with tears,
As she gazed at the twisted corpses
Cut off in their earliest years.

Some were bit by the bullet,
Some were kissed by the steel,
Some were crushed by the cannon
But all were still, how still!

These lines express Patton’s horror at the waste and carnage of modern warfare, knowledge that conflicted with his addiction to war’s intoxicating adrenaline rushes for the rest of his life. In his poem “Fear,” Patton writes, “I spare no class, or cult, or creed,/My course is endless through the year./I bow all heads, and break all hearts,/All owe me homage—I am FEAR!” Yet in “Peace—November 11, 1918,” Patton writes, “Oh! God of War/Grant that we pass midst strife,/Knowing once more the whitehot joy/Of taking human life.”

Birth of a Blog

I'll try to focus this blog on all matters related to writing, but I almost certainly will fail and disgress from time to time into politics ("a plague a' both [parties]" right now), sports (why, oh why, did the Gods of Sport allow Michigan to defeat Penn State?), and far-reaching rants.